A Tentative Study Of Cultural Mistranslation

This thesis purports to study cultural mistranslation within a narrow scope-ideational mistranslation in terms of ideology, literary aesthetics, value system, religion and artistic images. Cultural mistranslation, distinguished from pure technical errors in translation activities, is substantially and minutely induced by underlying transnational norms (cultural grids that function during the practice of translators), target norms in particular. Hence, cultural mistranslation proves highly revealing for translation studies against macro-cultural background.Cultural mistranslation is often held a paradoxical phenomenon: for one thing, it has invited constant attack from general critics because it violates the primary prerequisite of fidelity in translation activity; for the other, mistranslation unavoidably penetrates human being's translation activity through all eras, even with some popularizing for years. Traditional research, which is rigidly restricted by source culture-orientation, usually highlights empirical judgments and formalist comparison. And scholars often analyze mistranslation isolated from the cultural contexts, persisting on the fairly fruitless discussion of "equivalence", with long-term negligence of the process how mistranslation is subtly bred by profound cultural norms. The alongside effect is that its potential significances of research are from time to time overlooked. The stagnation of past study of cultural mistranslation calls for a shift of a perspective from source culture to target culture and the adoption of cross-disciplinary approach in translation studies. In other words, how translation operates under the target culture system, including its deformation, should come to the focus now. Therefore, the present thesis attempts to integrate anthropology and hermeneutics with Descriptive Translation Studies. These three theories can function harmoniously according to their affinity: theyall attach importance to the cultural character of translation, which underlies vast majority of mistranslation. Anthropology provides theoretical frame for the thesis, making it convenient to classify ideational mistranslation into five categories, as addressed previously. Anthropological knowledge not only helps define cultural mistranslation, but enables people to understand this phenomenon ontologically.Epistemologically, illuminating concepts contributed by hermeneutics, like preunderstanding (including fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception), are borrowed to justify the existence of mistranslation. Seen from hermeneutic perspective, interpretation is always grounded in something that we have in advance (fore-having), we see in advance (fore-sight), and we grasp in advance (fore-conception). It proves to be true that different translators, equipped with varied prestructured knowledge, always arrive at individualistic interpretations toward a single source text, including misinterpretation. The preunderstanding theory does provide epistemological perspective for cultural mistranslation. However, hermeneutics lacks operabiliry to analyze cultural mistranslation.For the sake of practicability and objectivity, descriptiveness is employed to guide the present study in methodology. Descriptive study, aiming at exhaustive analysis of existential translation phenomena with proper conclusion to testify those prescriptive rules, is not only an indispensable supplement to traditional methodology, but also an essential branch in building translation as a self-independent science. Central issues in Descriptive Translation Studies like reflections upon "correspondence", emphasis on translation purpose and function, advocate of interdisciplinary approach and establishment of translational norms shed considerable lights on the present study. The core conception of Descriptive Translation Studies: translational norms is exported into the thesis, and the main body of the thesis makes efforts to identify cultural and translational norms and in what way these norms concerning above five aspects give r...